Mauritian Creole

Multilingual Mauritius: Insights from Discourse, Interviews, and the Linguistic Landscape

Invited Talk for Wolfson College Humanities Society

The Elephant and the Whale Speak Creole: Comparative linguistic analysis of a folktale from Mauritius and Louisiana

This study with Oliver Mayeux undertakes a comparative analysis of two historical folktales, one in Mauritian Creole (MC) and the other in Louisiana Creole (LC). The Mauritian story comes from Charles Baissac’s (1888) collection Le Folk-lore de …

Switching or selecting? Competing and/or Complementary Perspectives on Discourse Markers in Multilingual Conversations.

Discourse Markers (DMs) are particularly susceptible to borrowing between languages and several approaches can provide a framework to analyse speech in multilingual contexts. This paper examines a structural and a pragmatic-functional perspective: …

Introduction to Creole Languages

Co-lead with Mauritian colleague, Dr Tejshree Auckle for the Introduction to Creole languages

Eski fitir-la touzour insertin? Is the future still uncertain? The acceptability of Mauritian Creole's elusive VA marker in future contexts

Most research regarding Mauritian Creole future marking was carried out in the 1990s and assumed differences in 'certainty' dictated the choice of future marker (Baker 1993; Hazaël-Massieux 1993; Touchard & Véronique 1993). The consensus was that the …

Language contact in writing: exploring the linguistic landscape of Mauritius.

Building on Bosquet-Ballah’s (2015) work, this small-scale study takes both a quantitative and qualitative approach to the linguistic landscape to investigate whether place affects the languages present. Sample areas in Port Louis, the capital, …

The Role of Language Contact in the Development of Three Mauritian Pragmatic Markers

Although the last few years have seen an increased interest in the communicative power of Creoles (cf. Migge, 2020; Rickford, 2019), thus starting to shift the focus away from the traditionally dominant structural and historical research …

Multiple Methods for Exploring TMA Marking in a Fieldwork Setting: Mauritian Creole, a Case Study

No single test is robust or exhaustive enough to accurately establish the meaning of tense, mood and aspect (TMA) markers. This article explores the benefits of using canonical and statistical approaches and a variety of elicitation tasks. The …

Ecologies of Creole Multilingualism workshop organisation

Organisation of a hybrid workshop about Creole Multilingualism

Pragmatic markers and verba dicendi: An investigation of Mauritian Creole

Offering a detailed investigation of three Mauritian Creole pragmatic markers based on one of the verba dicendi, dir ‘say’, in a corpus of spoken discourse, this article sets out to offer a preliminary insight into a category of elements that, to …